To call your radio station Amazing Radio, you need either a humungous ego or a very good product. At Amazing (amazingradio.co.uk), it's the latter: the station, broadcasting on DAB and online, promotes unsigned artists in shows hosted by new presenters.

If that all sounds potentially rough round the edges, it's not. Amazing Radio is a slick, professional affair, and the perfect antidote to playlist fatigue or X Factor ennui. This is how it works: artists upload their music to the partner site, Amazing Tunes – where artists receive 70% of revenue – and the most popular material makes its way on to the radio station.

In its structure and schedules, Amazing mimics conventional music stations, with the same daytime formats (Georgie Rogers presents an excellent breakfast show from 7am) and genre-based shows (individual slots cover folk, rock, dance music, live gigs). There's even a chart show from 5pm on Sundays.

There's something liberating about hours of completely new music, especially if you're used to listening to a station that thrives on the familiar. Yesterday's breakfast show featured an array of jaunty, perky tunes, including some seasonal weather themes. Frost, by Joyshop, had a very topical line about being on someone's mind "like frost on your nose when it's cold".

Rogers, hosting, keeps chat to a minimum, leaving you free to decide which new acts are marvellous, derivative or have the silliest names. Napoleon in Rags made me smile on a chilly morning, as did a forceful ditty called Girl. Kill. Smile. by Huski.

Inevitably the music on the daytime shows tends to be young, intense, and guitar-led. But the specialist shows counter this uniformity, as do features such as Region of the Week, which flags up diverse local music scenes. Amazing Radio isn't London-based – its offices are in Newcastle – and there's an impressive breadth of coverage. This is spirited music radio, and a broadcasting force for good.

• This story was amended on 6 December 2010. The word internet in the standfirst was changed to digital, to reflect the fact that Amazing Radio is broadcast throughout the UK on DAB.